Syria’s Bashar al-Assad says he’s certain to defeat rebels
A photograph from the Syrian Presidency’s Facebook page appears to show Bashar Assad meeting troops in Daraya on Aug. 1, 2013.
Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad visited troops stationed at Daraya, a former rebel stronghold near the capital, Damascus, on Thursday, according to Syrian officials.
Syrian TV and the Syrian presidency’s Facebook page showed Assad in his first known public trip outside the capital in more than a year.
In an address to officers on Army Day, the anniversary of the Syrian army’s creation, Assad said he was confident his side would win the 28-month-old war against Syrian rebels.
"If we were not sure that we were going to win in Syria, we would not have the ability to resist and the ability to continue fighting for more than two years against the enemy," he said, according to state-run news agency SANA.
More than 100,000 people have died in the conflict to date and nearly two million Syrians have fled the country.
Syrian government soldiers won an important victory this week – the Khaldiyeh district of Homs, known as the "capital of the revolution" against Assad.
Assad's forces finally expelled insurgents from Khaldiyeh and its narrow alleyways on Monday after a month-long assault, almost two years after their foes seized control of the district in the heart of Syria's third-largest city.
On his first visit since the capture of Khaldiyeh, the governor of Homs province, Talal al-Barazi, was taken aback.
"I could never have imagined such destruction. The terrorists (rebels), they destroyed the people, they destroyed the whole place. But we'll rebuild everything once we've finished with the terrorists firing nearby," he told Agence France-Presse.
The rebels are by no means done fighting. While Assad was in Daraya, rebels fired rockets at government-held neighborhoods in the city of Homs. The rockets hit a weapons depot, setting off explosions that killed about 40 people and wounded 120.
A video released online showed the destruction.
More from GlobalPost: The shocking video that sums up the Syria conflict in 30 horrible seconds
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.
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